‘Mirza. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.’ I took his hand in mine, and squeezed tight. He drew a deep breath, and for a moment we were equals, with nothing in common but our pain, with everything in common because of our pain.
‘Why did he have to be so arrogant? Why couldn’t he just have pretended to be scared? They would have let him go. We would all still be whole. The Poet, your mother, you, me. We would all still be whole.’
‘It might not have happened that way, Mirza.’
‘Then how? How do you see it happening?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what happened.’
‘But how do you imagine it?’
‘I don’t.’
There was a sound of footsteps. The waiter, coming up the stairs with Mirza’s food. Mirza waved him away.
‘You don’t imagine it? In all these years you haven’t imagined it?’
‘No.’
‘That scared of what it did to your mother?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning, if thinking about it could drive her mad, mightn’t it do the same to you?’
‘Drive her mad?’
‘Yes. Drive her mad. Imagining his death and knowing that if she hadn’t insisted on coming back to Karachi it wouldn’t have happened. If she hadn’t insisted on coming back because of you he wouldn’t be dead. If it wasn’t for her and you he wouldn’t be dead.’
I took a long sip of coffee. ‘Well. Things keep coming back to Lady Macbeth. Is that how you imagine her final two years here, Mirza? Years in which you almost never saw her. You think she floated around in a white nightgown, holding a candle above her head, sleepless with guilt, whispering, can all the seas of Arabia wash this blood from my hand?’ I tried to put the coffee cup down, but it kept missing the middle of the saucer and hitting the edges. On the third attempt, I managed it.
Then I looked up at him. ‘She didn’t come back for me, Mirza. I was never reason to stay or to return for either of them. Neither were you. That’s what kills us.’
‘Their shadows kill us, Aasmaani. The shadows we cower in. They asked, how do we change the world? How do we take on dictators without sacrificing the metre of a line? How do we keep from surrendering this nation? And you and I, their heirs, what do we ask? Where did my mummy go? Did my father-figure love me? We look at the mess of our lives, we look at the mess in which we live, and we say they failed us. We say it because that is so much easier than saying we are the ones who have failed. God, Aasmaani, what is this world we’re living in? How did we let it get like this? They would never have let it get like this.’
The roots of war are seeped in oil, so we join an oil company. A city we love becomes suspicious of the people of our religion so we leave that city. We don’t resist the abuses of power, we just make it clear we’re smart enough, aware enough, to understand our powerlessness. And at some level we believe that makes us admirable.
‘Mirza, things keep on. Like you said. They keep on and they keep on. Macbeth again. Remember, Omi always used to say the key to understanding Macbeth is understanding that he doesn’t keep killing to retain power. He keeps killing because he’s just following the momentum of that initial thrust of a dagger through Duncan’s heart. So the world keeps on. The momentum is more than you or I can fight against.’
‘Enough with Macbeth. You know, I don’t even think the Poet much liked the play. He was commissioned to translate Shakespeare, so he chose the shortest play.’ He laughed shakily. ‘We keep trying to construct meaning out of things. Why was he killed? Why did she become the way she became? Why did he choose Macbeth? We want grand reasons. We always want grand reasons. It was the shortest play. That’s it. That is it. Yes. I stopped believing in grandness when the Poet died. Greatness and grandness, stopped believing in them. And you? What do you believe in, Samina’s daughter, when you look around at this world in which the only grandness that exists is the grandness of opposing extremisms? What did they teach us, after all, that would be of any use in this stinking mess of a world?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t tell me “Nothing.”’ His voice was shaking with anger. ‘It can’t be nothing. Tell me what they taught us.’
‘They taught us to fight only with words. The words of an individual poet, or the words of a gathering of thousands chanting their slogans of protests.’
Mirza made a noise that would have been a laugh if it wasn’t so humourless. Here we both were, Mama and Omi’s heirs, drowning in words. We each had thousands at our disposal. And I suspected that Mirza could still see, as I did, that they were right — words continued to be both the battleground and the weapon. Mirza and I could recognize, as well as they ever did, the outrage in the discrepancy between ‘what is’ and ‘what is claimed’. But Mirza and I would do nothing about it. We would do nothing because we knew that in our refusal to fight for language with bombs or lies lay our defeat. No, it was nothing so grand as that. We knew how voices could be silenced. We knew that most shameful secret which Mama and Omi had tried so hard to keep from us: violence is more powerful than language.
‘So we lose,’ I said.
‘So we are lost.’ Mirza looked past me out of the window and I knew he wasn’t seeing the fairy lights outside, or even the sky.
We sat there in silence until it became unbearable. And then I left. As I drove away I could see him silhouetted against the window, still looking outside, seeing my mother and the Poet, and seeing himself, too, that version of himself that had existed when he still thought he was unbreakable.
Omi, how will your heart survive everything that has happened here in your absence?
XVI
The following morning was Eid. Despite everything that had happened the previous evening, I woke up smiling. Not true. I woke up, first, with a feeling of panic. A month of rising at dawn made waking in broad daylight feel like a transgression. But then I remembered, oh yes, Ramzan’s over. It’s Eid.
Eid had always been the day when I was simply Beema and Dad’s daughter, Rabia’s sister. The Poet was dismissive of organized religion (‘The more I sin, the more God will want me in heaven where he can keep an eye on me,’ he’d said in one of his more inflammatory interviews) and my mother said it seemed false to celebrate Eid when she hadn’t fasted, so even when they were in Karachi I never saw them on that day. And so Eid became, for me, the one day of the year when I could take a break from being her daughter and look around the table at Beema’s relatives, who descended on us en masse for lunch, and think, this sanity is, but for a technicality, my family.
Year after year, Eid in Dad and Beema’s house followed a pattern as unvarying and comforting as the progression of the moon from sliver to sphere marked with dark seas and craters. We’d wake up early — though it seemed late compared to the dawn rising — and someone (usually Beema) would hold up the morning papers to let us know that once again ritual had been maintained and the papers had prophetically announced that Eid would be celebrated ‘with fervour, festivity’. Before long, the house would fill with the smells of Eid lunch being cooked in the kitchen, and my father would give Rabia and me kulfis on sticks, bought the day before at Sony Sweets, and take us for a drive to get us out of Beema’s way as she made her elaborate feast. This was how Dad liked to celebrate Eid. Driving with his daughters, Indian film songs from long ago blasting through the speakers, consuming food in public for the first time in a month. He was always too lost in the music to communicate, so before long whoever was in the passenger seat would get tired of twisting around to talk to her sister and would clamber into the back seat.
Then, Rabia and I would categorize everyone we passed on Karachi’s streets. Men whose white shalwar-kameezes were creased in a way that showed they’d been kneeling and prostrating at morning prayers; women whose harried tailors had only finished stitching their clothes late the night before and still hadn’t quite got it right, leaving the women to tug at the seams around their armpits or pull up the neckline which revealed just a little too much skin; couples, stiff-backed and silent in cars, who had just been arguing about which relatives they had to call on and how long they had to stay; Parsis; drivers sent out by frantic housewives to find that one missing ingredient needed for today’s lunch, in a city where all the shops were closed for the holiday; children disgusted with their parents for running late, because it meant skipping visits to relatives known to be generous with Eidi. Every so often, when we saw someone who didn’t fit into any category and who had an air of general dissatisfaction (as opposed to all those with Eid-specific dissatisfaction) we’d whisper to each other, ‘Atheist.’ I knew atheists aplenty, thanks to the Poet, but it always seemed possible to forget that on Eid mornings and regard the unbelievers as strange creatures whose afflictions could not be spoken of out loud.